Lessons Learned from U.S. Humanitarian Interventions Abroad

National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 30

Published – May 9, 2000

Edited by Thomas S. Blanton

For more information contact:
Thomas S. Blanton 202/994-7000 or nsarchiv@gwu.edu

Washington, D.C., May 9, 2000 – Late last month, the U.S. Department of State released under
the Freedom of Information Act an interagency study of recent U.S. humanitarian
interventions titled, "Interagency Review of U.S. Government Civilian Humanitarian
& Transition Programs." Under this turgid bureaucratic title
lies an extraordinarily blunt, even scathing, "lessons learned" report
from inside the U.S. government on the successes and failures of the most
recent U.S. humanitarian interventions abroad, including Kosovo, Sudan,
Afghanistan, and the aftermath of Hurricane Mitch in Central America.
The document is 86 pages long (not counting a National Intelligence Council
annex that was not released). Two points jumped out from the document,
and informed readers may see others:

1. This is the way to make policy. Chaired by AID's James
Michel and State's policy planning director Morton Halperin, the interagency
group did its work from July to December 1999, wrote this report in January
2000 in unclassified (!) form, and released it under the Freedom of Information
Act at the end of April 2000. It is remarkable so soon after the
events to have such an inside critique; it is even more remarkable in the
foreign affairs world to have this critique written as an unclassified
document; and it is most remarkable of all to have State promptly release
the document within 20 days of when I requested it -- the letter of the
FOIA law, but honored more often in the breach than in the observance.

By comparison, that same final week in April we received after 39 years
(!) the Taylor Report investigation of the Bay of Pigs disaster in 1961.
Among the Taylor findings was that the CIA believed its own myths about
the smoke-and-mirrors Guatemala coup of 1954, and repeated the same mistakes,
first as tragedy, then as farce, for the Bay of Pigs. Afterwards,
the CIA locked up its Inspector General's report for three decades.
The contrast with this document leads me to conclude that State intends
this report to inform the current policy debate over humanitarian relief
programs, and that State is sophisticated enough to understand that the
debate cannot take place in secret, within cleared offices of the U.S.
government, precisely because humanitarian interventions abroad by definition
involve multiple actors outside the government, ranging from the U.N. to
charities and NGO's to other nations' relief agencies.

2. Close attention to bureaucratic arrangements can expose the policy
fault lines. It is probably no accident that this study was co-chaired
by a man who wrote the book, literally, on bureaucratic politics, Morton
Halperin. Half of the study is couched in purely organizational terms,
options with pros and cons, as to whose turf would shrink and whose would
expand. This does have the effect of making everybody come to the
table. The report concludes that "the most important impediment to
improved humanitarian effectiveness is lack of unified leadership within
the USG" (p. 9, Section I), and spends Section II detailing a full range
of bureaucratic reforms, such as discrete measures for better cooperation,
options for clarifying who's in charge, all the way up to full consolidation
of U.S. humanitarian functions into a single entity.

But right behind the process marches the substance. In the Kosovo
case study, you will see the kind of language policymakers usually avoid
in public, phrases like "deficient pre-planning," "UNHCR's weak leadership,"
"Macedonia's intransigence," "faulty assumptions," and "intelligence deficiencies"
and "gaps." With more self-criticism like this, and more openness
like this, maybe we are not doomed simply to repeat the past, or fight the last war.

Interagency
Review of U.S. Government Civilian Humanitarian & Transition Programs